Dig into questions and answers about America and its electoral process.
The Electoral College is the official system the United States uses to elect its president and vice president. Each state is assigned a certain number of electoral votes based on its population size. There are 538 electoral votes in total across the country, and a candidate needs to win a majority—at least 270 votes—to win the presidency.
When citizens vote on Election Day, they are actually voting for a slate of electors to represent their state’s choice in the presidential election. States also tabulate the votes cast by each individual, so when all votes are counted, the state reports on the “popular” vote as well as the electoral vote.
The electors meet in their respective state capitals on a very specific date: the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December. The timing harks back to the era when communication and travel were more difficult. This date gave the electors time to meet and then send their paper ballots (and yes, they do still use paper ballots) to Congress to be officially counted in early January.
To learn more about this election system and the resulting schedule, see Why is Election Day on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November?
When the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution in 1787, they had many questions about how voting would work. Citizens voted in local elections, but in a day when there was no internet or radio or television, how could voters learn enough to choose a national candidate?
If people cast their votes for electors who might be known locally, the founding fathers thought the electors might be more knowledgeable about the candidates.
The electoral system was also set up to solve another problem—to even things out between big states and smaller states. The number of electors for each state is equal to its total Congressional delegation. This means you take the state’s two senators and add the number of its representatives (which is based on the state’s population). If a state has 2 senators and 10 representatives, it would have 12 electoral votes.
Does this system work?
Unfortunately, this system is far from perfect. One of the main problems is that candidates can get more individual (popular) votes nationwide but still lose the election if they don’t get those all-important 270 electoral votes.
In the last 250 years, there have been five occasions when a candidate has won the presidency without winning the national popular vote. Two of those occasions were very recently:
In 2000, Al Gore won the national popular vote by about 500,000 votes. However, the election came down to the state of Florida. After a Supreme Court decision stopped a recount, George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes—which gave him the exact Electoral College votes he needed to become president.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes. However, Donald Trump won the Electoral College by narrowly winning several key swing states, securing his path to the presidency.
Here are a whole bunch of “firsts!”